The Fatal Mistake People Keep Making About DOGE

For the love of god, stop doing this!!!

Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

While you’re reading this, Elon Musk and his harem of barely-legal DOGE toadies are continuing to feed the federal government through an AI-powered industrial wood chipper. Jobs and vital programs go in, shitty tweets and pathetically incredulous Republicans come out. Lather, rinse, repeat.

While the full catastrophic impact of this rampage is yet to be felt — or even completely understood — it’s clear that the cumulative effect is going to land somewhere between “extremely bad” and “‘Children of Men’ but much, much dumber.” And yet, despite those enormous stakes, current efforts to blunt DOGE’s destructive path have largely been limited to a few successful court challenges (mostly ignored by the Trump administration) and some morale-boosting, but materially underwhelming, protests at federal buildings and Tesla dealerships. It’s not bad per se, but it’s not much, either.

Throughout it all, public reporting on DOGE’s work has largely fallen into one of two broad buckets: “red state voter faced with the consequences of their actions” and “DOGE claims it’s saved ninety gajillion dollars, but actually it was just 47 cents.”

The first bucket I don’t really care about one way or another. For the most part it’s the same sort of milquetoast journalism that sees The New York Times send reporters to interview a guy in a MAGA hat and Confederate flag t-shirt. But that second bucket? The flood of pedantic stories breathlessly proclaiming that, hey, guess what, DOGE’s math doesn’t add up? I fucking hate those. And you should too.

Allow me to explain.

First off, just so we’re all on the same page, here’s precisely what I’m talking about.